KRAKÓW — Pushing back against accusations of anti-Semitism,
Elon Musk has in recent months visited Israel, hosted Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu at a
Tesla factory in California, and repeatedly insisted he bears no
animosity toward Jews.
اضافة اعلان
On Monday, he took his penitence tour to a new level,
declaring himself “aspirationally Jewish” after a visit to the former Nazi
death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland, where he lit a candle in memory of the
millions of Jews murdered in the
Holocaust.
Musk stirred outrage in November when he endorsed an
anti-Semitic post on X as “the actual truth.” The post accused Jewish
communities of pushing “hatred against whites” and supporting the immigration
of “hordes of minorities.”
The White House denounced Musk for “abhorrent promotion of
anti-Semitic and racist hate.”
He quickly apologized for his intervention, saying, “It
might be literally the worst and dumbest post I have ever done.” He has been
scrambling since to calm the outcry and halt the exodus of his advertisers.
But his atonement was not all smooth sailing. After
apologizing for giving a platform to an anti-Semitic theory about
Jews conspiring to dilute the white population, he used an interview with Andrew
Ross Sorkin of the New York Times to tell unhappy advertisers to get lost in
vulgar terms and accused them of trying to blackmail him. He also threatened to
take legal action against the Anti-Defamation League, a rights group that has
complained about the rise in antisemitism on X.
Musk has faced a storm of criticism from the Anti-Defamation
League and other Jewish groups in the US that say he has allowed X to become a
vessel for anti-Semitic hatred since he purchased the platform for $44 billion
in October 2022.
A study last year by two British groups found that the
number of “plausibly anti-Semitic” posts rose by 105 percent in the months
after Musk took control of the platform and relaxed safeguards against hate
speech. “Our data presents a clear picture: anti-Semitism spiked on Twitter”
after Musk bought it and “has stayed at an elevated level in the months
thereafter,” the groups said in a report.
He is now back to presenting his less quarrelsome, more
understanding side.
After a visit to Israel in late November, during which he
toured the kibbutz where the events of October 7, 2023, took place, Musk on
Monday toured the site of what once was the Auschwitz concentration camp with
his 3-year-old son. Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the founder and chair of the
European Jewish Association, escorted him.
Speaking later at a conference on anti-Semitism organized by
the association in the nearby Polish city of Kraków, Musk said he had been
“somewhat naive” about the dangers posed by anti-Jewish sentiment because “in
the circles I move in, I see no anti-Semitism.”
“Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” he said. “I am Jewish
by association. I am aspirationally Jewish.”
At the same time, however, he repeated his long-standing
position, as a self-declared “free speech absolutist," that censorship is
not a good way to counter hate speech, noting that one of the first things
Hitler did after coming to power in Germany in 1933 was to “shut down the
press” and silence critical voices.
A video presentation before Musk took the stage in Kraków to
answer questions from right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro presented social media
as a force for good that, had it existed in the 1930s, could have reduced the
scale of the Holocaust by alerting Europe’s Jews to Hitler’s death camps and
allowing them to flee before it was too late.
Musk said he had seen a film from Auschwitz, which was
liberated by the Soviet Army in January 1945, “but it hits you much more in the
heart when you see it in person. I am still absorbing the tragedy of what
happened.”
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